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I’ve said (and read) it before: the concept of a great search engine is exactly at odds with advertising. A good search engine gives accurate results fast, while the purpose of advertising is to show users what advertisers pay to show them. In other words, it’s the difference between showing users what they want to see, versus showing users what advertisers want them to see.
Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.
I’ve just done the same search as in the article on Chrome, Firefox and DuckDuckGo
Google served 5 ads before showing me M&S’ website
DDG showed me an ad for Temu then M&S’ website
Firefox showed me no ad, thanks ublock, and straight to M&S’ website
Firefox isn’t a search engine, though?
Good point
Google knows that the more irrelevant results it returns, the longer you spend looking, which translates into more opportunities to show ads.
Which is ironic, as Google only managed to get as far as they did by doing the exact opposite in an era where Alta Vista and the small handful of other OG search engines were focused on maximizing revenue via ads.
Google has become that which they sought to destroy.
If its free you are the product.
And if you pay for it, you’re still the product…. Because it’s 2023 and fuck the consumers.
from the company that now completely ignores all the search syntax they trained us on – when
-,+,"..."actually meant somethingAre you kidding me? What the fuck
Google always seems to default to thinking that I am looking to buy something. It’s very nauseating. This is what Google shopping was supposed to be for. Search should be completely separated from shopping.
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Yeah I’m pretty much exclusively on DuckDuckGo these days, which is partially based on Bing but with a lot more privacy, and never really have any trouble.
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Cory Doctorow’s post this morning – Google’s enshittification memos
“Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves.”
Google‘s ‚auto complete‘ is driving me nuts sometimes and it‘s also prevalent on Youtube. I mean just scrolling through completely unrelated suggestions in Youtube‘s search results tells you how little they care to show you what you actually want and rather something that makes them more money one way or another. But the direct fiddling with actual search quarries is just malpractice for a search engine.
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I think shopping part of google search has the same problems as the rest of it just more so - there is a fundamental disconnect between searchers wanting neutral results and producers paying google to direct customers to their products. The more ability you have to control your search the less ability they have to sell highly ranked search results to advertisers.
that’s part of the reason I rarely use Google anymore
When I first switched off gmail there started to be a ton of stories that talked about Google doing terrible things with gmail. Now that I’ve recently given up Google search I’m seeing stories like this.
Either I have Spidey-sense for Google’s skeletons getting exposed or it’s that thing where you buy a car then see the same model everywhere. But in my case it’s like I sold a car and now see the same model everywhere, on the side of the road with the engine on fire.
Google was always like this (ok maybe not in the beginning but for the last decade at the very least). For some reason now, more media sources started writing negative things about Google, so it seems they are worse now, but they are just as they always were.
Before you had personal blogs saying the same thing but people don’t take those as seriously.
Maybe Microsoft started paying media sources to finally make a PR push to limit Googles enormous power. Microsoft wants to to the same thing though.
Kagi solves this problem
As I was reading the article, I was thinking how glad I was that I switched - I am on the yearly plan now because I’m not going back to “free” search engines.
I’m on the yearly ultimate or whatever they called it. My wife is interested too, but they don’t have an equivalent to the ultimate in the family package (yet), so she just sticks with bing.
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I use the perplexity app now. It’s okay.
And the shitification is confirmed.
I dunno about you, but THIS Queerie is trying their best to de-Google.
